Cycles in Hegemony

How the top-dog in international politics shifts in time

Photo by Andrew Stutesman on Unsplash

In my previous post, I introduced Quincy Wright’s war cycle. Wright also identified a second pattern of unusually big wars that occurred every other cycle.  These big wars were associated with the rise and fall of great powers.  The historian Arnold Toynbee proposed specific hundred-year cycles of war and peace to explain this pattern.  The leading proponents of this cyclic view of war today are the political scientists George Modelski and William Thompson.  They stress naval power (and its modern extension, carrier-based airpower) as the key military underpinning of world political leadership.  Their choice of successive world leaders: Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States reflects this viewpoint.  All four of these nations projected military power over a world-girdling trading empire through a first rank navy. 

Figure 1.  Share of total great-power capital ships held by successive world leaders

They measure naval power by noting the number of capital ships possessed by the world-leader as a fraction of all such ships held by all the great powers.  They define capital ships over the 1494-1654 period as any state-owned, gunned, long-range sailing vessel. For the 1655-1859 period, an escalating minimal number of guns carried is employed to qualify vessels as capital warships.  From 1860-1945, battleships (also subject to escalating minimal attributes in size and armament) are used as capital ships.  After 1945, heavy or attack aircraft carriers, and after 1960 nuclear attack submarines weighted by number of warheads are used in the definition of capital ships. Figure 7.2 presents the fraction of all capital ships of the great powers that were possessed by the leading power.  Peaks in naval power for successive leading nations can be seen about every hundred years, corresponding to the hundred-year cycles of Wright and Toynbee.  The last peak, the American one following World War II, was a bit delayed, occurring some 130 years after the previous British peak. 

The other major determinant of power is economic and flows from the pioneering of new leading sectors of the world economy.  Modelski and Thompson (1996) argue that the pioneering fifteenth century voyages down the African coast, begun under Portugal's Prince Henry the Navigator, set the stage for Portugal's world leadership period early in the sixteenth century.  Similarly, the maritime and financial innovations made by the Dutch in the sixteenth century underpin Dutch leadership in the seventeenth century.  Development of tobacco cultivation in Virginia and the coming of "Dutch finance" to Britain during the Glorious Revolution helped prepare the way for British leadership in the eighteenth century.  Britain won another round of leadership in the nineteenth century by their pioneering of the industrial revolution late in eighteenth century.  Finally, the spread to America of British ideas of liberal democracy in the eighteenth century and the practice of industrial capitalism on a continental scale in the nineteenth led to American leadership in the twentieth century, which continues to this day.

This idea of a nation's pioneering of a new leading sector, which are similar to "new economies," leading directly to subsequent world leadership fits in very well with the correspondence between war cycles and K-cycles.  What is not so clear is why leadership cycles should occur every two K-cycles (~100 years) when development of new economies and outbursts of great power war occur every K-cycle (~50 years). Using the idea of social contagion spreading war fever to explain war cycles, I suggest that in the next period of war fever following the rise of a new hegemon, a new generation of political elites of the other great powers experience the reality of the new international order leading to remedial policy choices that manifest in future wars. For example, the experience of the Seven Years war led the other Great Powers to express a unified anti-British stance during the American Revolution. Similarly, while the British backed the French in their war against the Dutch hegemon in 1672, they became alarmed by the rise in French power after that (see Figure 2) and so fought on the Dutch side in the next war.

The shift from one world leader to another occurs during a period of what Modelski and Thompson call Global War.  Although periods of Global War do tend to contain big wars, it is the change in world leader that makes them special.  In general, the reigning world leader is challenged by another power for leadership. As a result of this challenge, one or more coalition wars are fought between the challenger and her allies and the old leader and her allies.  One of the countries on the winning side of this conflict emerges as the new world leader.  On one occasion it was the old world-leader who came back for a second round of leadership.

Figure 2. Share of total armies held by successive leading land-based Great Powers

The role of challenger typically is played by a continental power, whose major strength is land-based.  Ludwig Dehio developed a view on war cycles that focused on these land-based powers.  He notes a tendency for peaks in land-based power to occur around the time of low points in sea-based power, and vice versa. For Dehio the key powers have been Spain, France, and Germany.  Dehio believed the USSR (Russia) would play the role of the next continental power in the decades after the 1940's. Land-based power can be measured much as was done with naval strength.  A simple measure is the size of the regional power's army relative to all great power armies combined.  Figure 2 shows a graph of land power for the four successive regional powers.  Since all great powers maintain fairly substantial armies, the degree of dominance displayed by the world leaders in naval power are typically not attained by land-based powers (except for the case of Habsburg Spain in the early 16th century).  Nevertheless, a pattern of fairly regular peaks can be seen, each associated with one of Dehio's key actors. Comparison of Figures 1 and 2 does show that peaks in land power and sea power do seem to alternate (see Table 1).

Table 1.  Peaks in war, navies, and armies compared to the world leadership cycle

Modelski and Thompson integrate Dehio's powers (which they call regional powers) into their leadership cycle.  The country enjoying the naval power peak is called a world power.  The war peak immediately preceding the naval power peak is called global war (or general war by Toynbee).  During the global war period or immediately before, there is an army peak.  The country holding land power dominance at this peak becomes the challenger during the global war.  The country showing a rise to naval dominance after the global war is the new world leader.  The concept of global or general war accounts for half of the war/army peaks and all of the naval peaks.  The other war/army peaks fall between global/general wars.  The war peaks between the global wars are called supplementary wars by Toynbee.  Typically, an army peak occurs at the same time or immediately after supplementary wars.  Supplementary wars can be thought of as contests between potential regional powers that decide who will be the challenger during the next global war.

The peaks in war, naval power and army share were combined into a composite cycle in Table 1.  This composite cycle provides the empirical support for Modelski and Thompson's World Leadership cycle.  The cycle begins with Global War, a period of great power conflict in which an economically-advanced sea power and a politically-strong land power struggle for the role of global power.   The sea power wins as measured by a rise in its naval share and a fall in the land powers army share following the conflict.  Figure 2 shows sharp drops in the army share of the challenger following the Global War conflicts which ended in 1609 (Spain), 1714 (France), 1815 (France) and 1945 (Germany).

Following Global War comes the World Power phase of the cycle.  With one exception, army share of regional powers falls to a minimum during this time.  It is the time of maximum hegemony of the new world leader.  In time, army power of potential regional powers rises, and a series of wars are fought through which a new regional power emerges.  The world leader is unable to prevent the emergence of this new regional power; its role as leader is said to be delegitimized.  Hence, the period of increased warfare during which this happens is called Delegitimation when considered from the point of view of the world leader.  When considered from the point of view of the next world leader, it is called Agenda-setting, as the groundwork for future leadership is laid during this time.

Following Delegitimation/Agenda-setting comes Deconcentration, which is typified by the development of a minimum in the naval power graph.  It is the time of minimum hegemonic power of the old world leader and sets the stage for the coming period of Global War.  As the power of the world leader falls, the regional power challenger and the future world leader build coalitions for the coming showdown.  From their point of view, this phase is called Coalition-building.  Eventually a new round of global war breaks out and the cycle is complete.

Table 2 shows that the Leadership Cycle fits the empirical markers quite well up through the end of WW II. How to deal with WW II has been a problem for war cycle theorists because it occurred completely outside of the fifty-year rhythm of great power wars. Modelski and Thompson dealt with this issue by combining both world wars into a single Global War period, similarly to how the Nine Years War (1688-97) and War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) were combined. The period since WW II did not seem to correspond as well with the model as earlier cycles, or so I thought when I first learned about this cycle in 2000. I found Modelski and Thompson’s characterization of the 1990’s as part of a Delegitimation period of declining American prestige and emergence of rising competitors hard to believe given the collapse of the Soviet Union and Japanese stagnation, compared to American leadership in the burgeoning information economy, federal budget surpluses, and the rising productivity of the late nineties.

I was then unaware of the secular cycle and cultural evolution. Although I well knew about wage stagnation since 1973, I attributed that to the effects stagflation resulting from external factors (oil crises) and the high unemployment needed to combat inflation. I had thought that the elimination of budget deficits, allowing lower interest rates and low unemployment, would solve the wage stagnation problem. Furthermore. I thought the productivity slowdown after 1970 was due to being in the very early stage of the information economy leading sector, that did not take off until the 1990’s. Hence, I saw Modelski and Thompson’s scheme as overly pessimistic and came up with my own modified scheme where the fall of the Soviet Union had started a second round of American hegemony with the next Global War period safely in the 2060’s, long after my time. Based on this view, I made the following prediction as an “experimental” test of my idea in 2001 (Kondratiev cycle p 169):

President Bush should be able to build a potent and effective coalition and bring the War on Terrorism to a successful conclusion in a matter of years rather than decades. The outcome of the War on Terrorism can then serve as a test of the new paradigm as applied to the leadership cycle.

The spectacular failure of this prediction clearly shows that I was way off-track in 2000. As I have since learned, the 1960’s decision to prioritize fighting Communism over the domestic economy meant that America had started on a path towards decline in the very same year as it chose to pursue the Vietnam War. The decision of the Republican party to embrace what was called supply-side economics began the shift from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism that I see as the reason why we have an economy that does not support marriage, families, and generally cannot do stuff like win wars. It now makes sense to see a post-1973 Delegitimation period during which American economic strength buckled, the people lost faith in the government, inequality began to rise, and with it, political polarization. It is easy to see how the Iraq war, 2008 crisis, and Afghanistan defeat are consistent with a Deconcentration period beginning in 2003. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the rise what blogger Noah Smith calls the New Axis fits in well with a Coalition Building period.

According to the Leadership cycle, we should be entering a Global War phase in the latter part of this decade, which is why I have added large-scale war as a possible resolution for the secular cycle crisis.